BPMN Modelling of Services with Dynamically Reconfigurable Transactions

We promote the use of transactional attributes for modelling business processes in the service-oriented scenario. Transactional attributes have been introduced in Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) to decorate the methods published in Java containers. Attributes describe “modalities” that discipline the reconfiguration of transactional scopes (i.e., of caller and callee) upon method invocation. An original element of our research programme is the definition and study of modelling and programming mechanisms to control dynamically reconfigurable transactional scopes in Service-Oriented Computing (SOC). On the one hand we give evidence of the suitability of transactional attributes for modelling and programming SOC transactions. As to a proof of concept we show how BPMN can be enriched with a few annotations for transactional attributes. On the other hand, we show how the results of a theoretical framework enable us to make more effective the development of transactional service-oriented applications.